Charley Honey: Questions help us ponder our spiritual connection

A recent sunset, pictured from Kentwood, magnificently displayed the beauty of creation -- one of the experiences readers are asked to notice in Lynn Underwood's new book, "Spiritual Connection in Daily Life." Charles Honey | MLive.com

Connected. That’s how I felt one Monday evening this summer, strolling through John Ball Park on jazz night.

Older couples and young people spread across the grass in lawn chairs, listening to Mary Rademacher sing “Mood Indigo” with a jazz combo. The roses bloomed in rich reds and pinks while amazing cloud formations rolled overhead. A woman sat at her easel, painting it all.

It was a passing moment, quickly overtaken by the onslaught of daily life. But I remember it still and always will. Such moments help many of us feel at a deeper level the spiritual connections coursing through life, regardless of the religious significance we do or don’t attach to them.

It’s the kind of experience Lynn Underwood seeks to explore in her book, “Spiritual Connection in Daily Life,” recently published by Templeton Press. Underwood proposes 16 questions to help readers taste the “flavors that are already there in daily life, but that we are somehow missing,” she writes.

“I think these are cool things to be experienced,” she told me in a phone interview from her Cleveland area home. “When things are going OK but are feeling kind of blah, they can really add a lightness and a vividness and a beauty to life we often miss out on.”

Much preferring beauty to blah, I have found her 16 “little questions” sometimes a big help in starting my day. Reading each one as a meditation makes me think about how often I experience connection to what Underwood calls the “more than” in everyday life.

Sample questions: “I am spiritually touched by the beauty of creation”; “I feel God’s presence (or) the presence of the divine or holy”; “I find comfort in my religion or spirituality.” Each is accompanied by six choices, from “never” to “many times a day,” along with an invitation to write about your experiences.

The questions are designed for everyone from Christians and Jews to Muslims and Hindus, from orthodox believers to agnostics. In personal interviews and research using the questions, Underwood has found commonalities among these diverse folks – especially when it comes to those battling illness or other adversities.

“We’re all dealing with struggles, and some of us really major struggles,” said Underwood, a consultant, writer and speaker. “By focusing on your own personal experiences of these things in daily life there’s something that can sustain us, (and) help us to focus on and connect with something that is more than these events in our lives.”

Underwood shares the struggles and experiences of her own life, which led her to formulate the questions out of her medical research. She has a doctorate in cancer epidemiology, worked for 10 years in Northern Ireland and has taught at several colleges including Western Michigan University. She’s worked with the World Health Organization and National Institutes of Health.

She also has strong ties to West Michigan. Her husband, Eric Beversluis, hails from the area and taught at Aquinas College, and she worked for nearly 15 years at Kalamazoo’s Fetzer Institute as program director and vice president for science research.

While at Fetzer she pushed to include spirituality in research on health and aging but was told there was no way to measure that. Being a good scientist, she set out to do so.

Thus emerged the 16 questions. She fleshed them out in interviews with everyone from West Michigan folks and inner-city Chicago residents to Muslims in Turkey and monks at the Abbey of Gethsemani, the Kentucky monastery once home to Thomas Merton.

The questions, called the Daily Spiritual Experience Scale, have since been used in more than 100 studies around the world. More frequent daily spiritual experiences have been linked to happier marriages, less loneliness and more giving behavior. Underwood also found it to aid inter-religious dialogue in religiously conflicted areas such as Romania, Indonesia and Malaysia.

“We are spiritual beings,” Underwood told me. “It just gives us strength, but it also gives us perspective on how does this physical situation we’re in relate to a larger reality that is more solid in many ways than the ephemeral of the world.”

Although a reader can add up the points of his or her responses to a total sum, Underwood doesn’t provide a scale interpreter, e.g., “75: spiritually searching but struggling.” The points don’t matter as much as your experiences, she says: “It’s the qualitative answers I’m more interested in than the numbers.”

She hopes people could find it useful in small group settings as well as companies and religious institutions. If you’re interested, you can find out more at her website.

It’s helped me to be a little more aware of the beauty of a stunning sunset, or a splendid jazz night in John Ball Park.